History Buffs Read The River of Doubt for November

About the BookAt once an incredible adventure narrative and a penetrating biographical portrait, The River of Doubt is the true story of Theodore Roosevelt’s harrowing exploration of one of the most dangerous rivers on earth.

The
River of Doubt—it is a black, uncharted tributary of the Amazon that
snakes through one of the most treacherous jungles in the world. Indians
armed with poison-tipped arrows haunt its shadows; piranhas glide
through its waters; boulder-strewn rapids turn the river into a roiling
cauldron.

After his humiliating election defeat in 1912,
Roosevelt set his sights on the most punishing physical challenge he
could find, the first descent of an unmapped, rapids-choked tributary of
the Amazon. Together with his son Kermit and Brazil’s most famous
explorer, Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, Roosevelt accomplished a feat
so great that many at the time refused to believe it. In the process,
he changed the map of the western hemisphere forever.

Along the
way, Roosevelt and his men faced an unbelievable series of hardships,
losing their canoes and supplies to punishing whitewater rapids, and
enduring starvation, Indian attack, disease, drowning, and a murder
within their own ranks. Three men died, and Roosevelt was brought to the
brink of suicide. The River of Doubt brings alive these
extraordinary events in a powerful nonfiction narrative thriller that
happens to feature one of the most famous Americans who ever lived.